Christa Olson teaches about writing, rhetoric, and visual culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where she is an Associate Professor of English. As a rhetorical historian, Christa is interested in how pictures have shaped values and beliefs and how they prompt us to act. In her teaching and her writing, she uses that focus on pictures to illuminate issues related to nationalism, social movement, and democracy in the Americas. In addition to researching 19th and early 20th century visual culture in Latin America, she regularly writes about news photography for a popular audience on the site Reading the Pictures, and she is at work on a book about photography and the contemporary U.S.-Mexico border.